Zumwalt Poems Online

Archive for September, 2025

Tom Waits, Van Der Graaf Generator, Steve Hackett; Fifty Year Friday: September and October 1975

Welcome back to Fifty Year Friday! It is my great pleasure to announce that our first entry is by an esteemed and respected writer who, for reasons we won’t question, has graciously agreed to provide material for us under the nom de guerre of Leo The Deacon. If you can navigate a substantial drop in quality, a few of my own Fifty Year Friday entries follow. Enjoy!

Tom Waits: Nighthawks at the Diner

If ever there was an artist and an album deserving of the rubric sui generis, it is Tom Waits and this, his third album Nighthawks at the Diner. At a time—October 1975—when progressive rock was on the cusp of going to seed, disco was poised to go mainstream, and Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea had set aside post-bop to explore jazz-rock fusion, Waits came out with a two-disc album in which he performs mostly original songs, backed up by a quartet of first-rate Los Angeles jazz sidemen, in front of a small live audience.  As a bookish 20-year-old who never quite embraced rock music—despite the earnest and occasionally successful efforts of the curator of this blog to interest me in such groups as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant—I found Waits’ wry, atmospheric, jazz-inflected compositions  a subversive challenge to the hegemony of rock and roll. Nighthawks appealed not just to the emotions, but to the head. It did not hurt that his profane, salacious, and very funny banter between songs was well calculated to engage the sensibilities of college guys whose weekends, more often than not, were spent in the company of other dateless young men.

So is Nighthawks a jazz production, or a singer/songwriter presentation? Yes. Here’s where it gets interesting, because throughout the performance Waits meanders about the intersection of several genres:  jazz, singer/songwriter compositions, spoken word, a bit of stand-up comedy. Hell, in the cut “Big Joe and Phantom 309” Waits even covers a country-music song by Red Sovine about a ghostly trucker. The entire album is a musical Venn diagram of multiple converging circles. One can’t even call it a “live” album, exactly, because it was recorded in a studio, but in front of an audience hand-picked by the producer to convey the feel of a live performance. It’s not quite authentic but it works, especially as it allows the listener to experience the entire Waits shtick: the guttural banter, the jokes, the wordplay, and the music.

The mood is set from the get-go in the opening intro, with the quartet playing a bluesy vamp featuring Jim Hughart’s walking bass and short, honking arabesques by Pete Christlieb on the sax. The sound is that of a cool, if jaded, house band at a burlesque club and Waits reinforces the conceit by welcoming the audience to the fictitious “Rafael’s Silver Cloud Lounge,” and thanking the stripper who ostensibly warmed up the audience and put a charge into Waits’  libido.  He continues with some introductory jokes about late nights and coming home after three months to find everything in his refrigerator has “turned into a science project.”  As he talks, Waits elegantly elides into the first song, “Emotional Weather Report,” which is more rhythmic spoken word recitation than it is singing. He bemoans the “tornado watches…in the western region of my mental health” and declares that “It’s cold out there—colder than the ticket-taker’s smile at the Ivar Theater on a Saturday night.” Jilted by his lover, Waits’ forecast is for more precipitation.

The rest of the album more or less follows the same pattern, with Waits sustaining a twisted down-and-out persona as he leads into another song or spoken word performance, backed by the jazzmen and revolving around themes of loneliness, lost love, late nights, and life at the margins. For my money, the best cut on the album is the third, “Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)” in which Waits precisely captures the milieu of an all-night coffee shop. In this song, (this time he is singing rather than reciting), Waits displays his artistry in clever turns of phrase and the ability to evoke the bittersweet mood of a lonely late night out after a break-up. Atmospherics and the skilled deployment of similes and metaphors are Waits’ stock in trade and he’s at his best in “Eggs and Sausage.”

Waits is often compared to the Beat poets, but that’s not quite right. His music at this stage of his career, and particularly on this album, is reminiscent of the Beats, with its jazz and spoken word poetry, and its exploration of loneliness and alienation. But unlike the Beats, Waits isn’t concerned with philosophy or spirituality, or even drug-induced altered states of consciousness. For the most part, alcohol is Waits’ drug of choice and that and his focus on the working class and marginalized perhaps slides him closer to the Beats-adjacent Charles Bukowski. Both Bukowski and the Beats expressed profound alienation, however, with the Beats setting themselves in opposition to the 1950s military-industrial complex and Bukowski challenging the smug conventionality and moral sensibilities of bourgeois America. Waits isn’t overtly political, like the Beats could be, and he certainly doesn’t indulge in the blunt rage and belligerence of Bukowski. Rather, despite the crusty delivery, he is sentimental. In the end, Nighthawks, as well as Waits’ other music of the mid-1970s, is not concerned so much with alienation as with hard luck, loneliness, and the struggle to carve a little dignity out of an uncaring universe. On Nighthawks, the world is what it is, and Waits knows it is a mug’s game to try to change it.

Tom Waits, at any point in his long musical career, is an acquired taste. Those fans, likely younger ones who are more familiar with the growling, iconoclastic, and experimental performer Waits morphed into starting with 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, may find the younger Waits of Nighthawks in the Diner more conventional—dare we say “quaint”?—than the older artist they are familiar with.  But in 1975, Waits’ retro-beatnik hipster persona, jazzy music, and well-crafted noirish lyrics was something different from the dominant electronic-heavy compositions of rock and fusion. From the perspective of fifty years, it holds up well, although younger listeners may find themselves bemused by Waits’ frequent references on this album to LA “landmarks” that have passed into history—The Copper Penny restaurants, the seedy Ivar Theater, the  Ziedler & Ziedler clothing store on Sunset, and KABC weatherman Dr. George Fischbeck, to name a few.

If there is a flaw in Nighthawks, it is that the persona Waits adopts narrows the variety of the songs. To be sure, on a few tracks—“Warm Beer and Cold Women,” “Nobody,” and the country-ish “Putnam County”—Waits veers into his singer/songwriter roots, dials back the jazz, and sings accompanied by himself on piano. By and large, though, the album is a series of Waits’ compositions backed up by well-executed jazz incidental music. The jazz frames the mood, but the fun is in skillful lyrics, the repartee and wry observations, and the dark, at times cynical, yet not despairing atmosphere that Waits conjures up. It is an eccentric artifact of its time, but it still rewards the listener and reminds us that the 1970s weren’t all bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and leisure suits. 

—Leo the Deacon

Van Der Graaf Generator: Godbluff

Released in October 1975 in the UK, this album was only available as an import. It wasn’t until I made a trip to Europe in 1978 that I purchased it in Amsterdam and had it and several other albums shipped from a post office near the record store back to the States. That particular parcel of LPs arrived home earlier than I, and so once I was home, I put it on my beloved turntable. Wow!

As a great admirer of their previous album, Pawn Hearts, which I had bought as a cut-out in the US for less than three dollars, I had high expectations for this. Fortunately, the quality of the lyrics and music did not disappoint.

After a four-year gap between Godbluff and Pawn Hearts, Peter Hammill, Hugh Banton, Guy Evans, and David Jackson roar back more powerfully than ever with less psychedelic and excursionary elements and an apparent singular focus on drama and controlled handling of musical tension and release. Hammill displays his range of skills on vocals, superior in dramatic and expressive impact to more famous contemporary singers/songwriters like David Bowie, and even contending with the otherworldly emotional delivery of Demetrio Stratos of Area and Francesco Di Giacomo of Banco del Mutuo Soccorso. Hugh Banton and Guy Evans are in great form on keyboards and percussion; and we have David Jackson on double saxophones, à la Rahsaan Roland Kirk, creating musical textures that elevate the music experience to breathtaking intensity.

Side One opens with “The Undercover Man”, which starts softly, creating musical and dramatic suspense. Once the tension is established, it methodically builds in intensity, layer by layer, gradually crescendoing, leading to some colorful organ, sax and the further unfolding of the brilliant expression and pacing of Hammill’s staggered and passionate vocals.

“Scorched Earth”, the second of two tracks on the first side, maintains intensity, opening up quietly and building in dynamics with repetitive motives weaving through Hugh Banton’s organ part and David Jackson’s deftly engineered sax parts supported by Guy Evans’s relentlessly polyrhythmic drum work. The forward momentum cools, with an initially echoey middle section, crafted out of preceding musical material that explodes into an unpredictable flurry of syncopated melodic material and violent skirmishes of accelerating ostinatos and motivic interchanges. Two dominant mixed meters alternate. Dynamic and rhythmic shifts continue to propel the music forward to an abrupt climax ending with a brief musical exhale.

Side two opens up reflectively with “Arrow”, with a meandering and introspective introduction ferociously interrupted with Hammill’s vocals which commence to entwine and shape the course of the music leading into an instrumental of repeated sax permutations on the primitive four-note saxophone motive heard earlier but not put through a series of repeated modifications. Hammill’s vocals return with full intensity and anguish:

How long the time seems
How dark the shadow
How straight the eagle flies
How straight towards his arrow

How long the night is
Why is this passage so narrow?
How strange my body feels
Impaled upon the arrow

This is followed by more sax-dominated instrumental and intensive, unrestrained percussion eventually trailing off into a sustained whimper.

The last track, “Sleepwalker”, described by Hammill as portraying “life in death, death in life” begins boldly with a brilliant 9/8-based mixed-meter motif, syncopated and off-kilter, creating a lurching, stumbling feel, realized flawlessly by sax, organ and percussion. Once the pattern is established for the listener, it moves into an accompaniment foundation for Hammill’s vocals:

At night, this mindless army, ranks unbroken by dissent
Is moved into action and their pace does not relent
In step, with great precision, these dancers of the night
Advance against the darkness – how implacable their might!

The second section starts off as a tango with güiro, organ, clavinet and then sax on melody– but it is a 3/4 tango! It then contorts itself evolving into the opening motif for brief return of theme A, but these expectations are quickly tossed aside with an intro into a completely new section in a relentless, undeniable 4/4, the sax and rhythm hinting at a brief funky disco feel before the band shuts down that possibility completely with aggressive prog-rock percussion, sax and Hammill’s searing vocals.

A necessary aside on the artistic nature of David Jackson’s approach to the saxophone: dubbed “the Van Gogh of the saxophone” by a critic of the British New Musical Express, Jackson was described as a “renegade impressionist, dispensing distorted visions of the world outside from his private asylum window”. Following in the footsteps of jazz artists like John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Albert Ayler, Jackson focused on fully leveraging timbral and tonal qualities of his instrument to deliver a wider range of emotional experiences.

Two key elements defined his style. The first was his signature use of double horn — playing two saxophones (typically alto and tenor) simultaneously, creating dense harmonies and powerful, layered riffs. The second, and more crucial for “The Sleepwalkers,” was his pioneering use of electronics using customized pickups, octave dividers, wah-wah pedals, and powerful amplification, transforming the saxophone from a purely acoustic instrument into a versatile prog-rock sound source, capable of generating textures and timbres far beyond its natural range, allowing him to sonically manifest the fragmentation, distortion, and psychological turmoil central to VDGG’s music — and provide a fully-effective soundscape for Hammill’s autonomically engaging, intensely visceral vocal delivery.

The synthesis of those two saxophones, the bass pedals and organ work of Banton, Evans’s driving polyrhythmically-paced percussion, always at the service of the music and text propels us into the psychedelic-flavored coda which slowly evaporates into nothingness, leaving the lingering essence in the listener’s mind, eventually compelling a repeat playing of one of the finest albums

Steve Hackett: Voyage of the Acolyte

Released in October 1975, I never had enough money to buy this in my college days — such a shame, as this is a wonderful album and provides insight into how much Steve Hackett contributed compositionally to the many of the passages within Genesis’s Nursery Cryme and Supper’s Ready. Excellent, evocative and reflective music that sparkles as wondrously as ever.

Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd released their ninth studio album in September of 1975. Fifty years later their The Dark Side of Moon boost has maintained their popularity enough so that there are multiple sets out this month celebrating the fiftieth anniversary. If you haven’t heard this album yet, you probably weren’t listening to music fifty years ago!

Can: Landed; Jethro Tull: Minstrel In the Gallery; Electric Light Orchestra: Face the Music

All released in September of 1975, all three of these albums have their strong moments and are worth checking out. Can’s Landed starts off with grungy rock badly recorded, but ends strongly with the musique concrète of “Unfinished” with much of interest in between.

Jethro Tull’s Minstrel In the Gallery is more reflective than his previous three albums and seemingly more personal. Thematically, the album lyrics cover the introspective and the cynical, with Ian Anderson’s lyrics exploring the isolation and pressures of being a public performer — Anderson being that Minstrel in the Gallery. Throughout a good deal of the album Martin Barre’s electric guitar is in the forefront and borders on a jazz-fusion ethos contrasted in other sections with delicate acoustic guitar. The album’s highlight is the musically and metrically complex, multi-part “Baker Street Muse” on side two, lasting over sixteen minutes with sharp contrasts and sharp lyrics.

ELO’s Face the Music opens up with an orchestral intro and explodes with their signature blend of strings, Jeff Lynne’s guitar, drums, and keyboards. The excellent opening instrumental, which highlights Mik Kaminski on violin, is followed by a classic-sounding ELO track, “Waterfall, reminiscent of Eldorado material. As mentioned earlier by Leo the Deacon, September 1975 ushers us into the mainstream days of disco fever and ELO made good money with an edited single version of the third track “Evil Woman.” I had stopped listening to AM radio long before 1975, but somehow I was still exposed to it enough in various public venues that I developed a rather strong aversion to its annoyingly commercially cloying sound. The remaining album has its ups and downs, and includes a number sounding much like the pre-disco Bee-Gees (“Strange Magic”) and Lynn’s excursion into country music, “Down Home Town.”

Besides these albums we have a wealth of other releases, not at the level of Godbluff by any means but much more commercially successful including albums by George Harrison, John Lennon, Elton John, Paul Simon, his former singing mate, Art Garfunkel, Rush, Herbie Mann, Linda Ronstadt, Roxy Music, Sparks, Steeleye Span, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Frank Zappa, Hall & Oates, Crosby and Nash without Stills, and though I haven’t a clue what it sounds like, and am totally fine with that, Kiss’s Live Album, which apparently is the first album released by any American hard rock band, for if memory serves me correctly Spinal Tap had not released any live albums by that date — or to be factually correct, now that I check Wikipedia, still has not.

Category:

Album review, Country Rock, Fifty Year Friday, Folk Rock, Progressive Rock, Rock

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Lecture on Overflow

This is our fourth lecture.

Overflow

      Treading on thin lines
   Like a marginal ropewalker
         A lively rosalia
Imitates the chains of population
         And a farandola
   Is forced to associate
         With septuplets.
         Grapes and fapes
   And berries and cherries
     Are often used in wine
   While the stronger stuff
        Will bear no fruit
            But would rather
  Base its structure on grain.
    A foundation falters when
               The edifice
                   Is too
                     Tall
And that is why there are  
                                            building codes
                                 And yet laws may be broken
       And in      such              disasters
                           Man's fate will tumble like a
                                           hippopotamus on 
                                                       ice.



— Zumwalt (1974)

The Lecture: The Hippopotamus on Ice

Greetings, poetry lovers. Today we continue our journey through the works of Zumwalt with his 1973 poem, “Overflow.” If our last lecture on “They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble” explored a world freezing under the weight of meaningless information, “Overflow” examines the structures that contain that information — our social, intellectual, and even artistic systems. The poem is a profound meditation on scale, a warning against the oversized and unnatural edifices of modern life. It argues that we have built systems so large and so sterile that their collapse is not only inevitable, but will also be utterly absurd.

We will trace the poem’s argument through its three distinct movements: from the precarious state of the individual within an overwhelming collective, through a brilliant metaphor on the nature of systems, to the final, unforgettable vision of collapse.

I. The Precarious Individual and the Overwhelming Collective

The poem opens with an image of profound instability:

Treading on thin lines Like a marginal ropewalker

This is the state of the modern individual. We are not on solid ground, but performing a delicate balancing act on the “thin lines” of societal rules and expectations. The word “marginal” is interesting, serving multiple purposes — marginal room for error, the rope is a margin, etc. but also hinting that the ropewalker is not the star of the show, but a peripheral, almost irrelevant figure, precariously suspended over a metaphorical void.

Now, Zumwalt gives us two really beautiful and strange juxtapositions here to illustrate the crushing weight of the collective. He writes:

A lively rosalia
Imitates the chains of population
And a farandola Is forced to associate
With septuplets.

Let’s stop on that word rosalia. If you are into insects, you might recognize “rosalia” as the scientific name for a genus of a type of longhorn beetle. Maybe Zumwalt was aware of this, maybe not, but forget the beetle definition; the musical one is the one that is relevant. In music, a rosalia is a melodic sequence that gets repeated, moving up or down the scale one step at a time. It’s a pattern. And while it can be engaging and interesting, it can also become incredibly predictable and boringly robotic if overused — an aesthetic trap.

So when Zumwalt says this musical chain “imitates the chains of population,” he’s crafting a brilliant metaphor for oppressive conformity, the sound of a society stuck on repeat.

And he then cleverly “transposes” this idea of a chain from the musical to the physical with the image of the “farandole,” a joyful, chaotic, communal chain dance where people link arms, guided by a leader. But in this world, the dance — or more accurately, this instance of those dancing this dance — is “forced to associate / With septuplets.” This is the poem’s central, absurd crisis. Imagine the leader of that winding dance, our “marginal ropewalker,” trying to guide the chain through its intricate patterns while simultaneously being forced to carry seven infants. One baby would be a challenge. Two a struggle. Seven a complete catastrophe.

What Zumwalt seems to be saying is that in this world of “overflow,” our most organic forms of art and community are being crushed. The lively musical pattern becomes a robotic trap, and the joyful community dance is saddled with an impossible, life-choking burden. Given the era’s anxieties about a population explosion, the “septuplets” are not just a random number; they are a symbol of a world producing more than it can possibly sustain. It’s a vision where our artistic and social structures are doomed to collapse, not from an external attack, but from being overloaded from within.

II. The Wine and the Grain: A Metaphor for Systems

Having established the plight of the individual, Zumwalt pivots to the poem’s philosophical core, presenting a masterful metaphor for two different kinds of systems:

Grapes and fapes
And berries and cherries
Are often used in wine
While the stronger stuff
Will bear no fruit
But would rather
Base its structure on grain.

Here, he contrasts wine with distilled spirits. Wine is made from fruit — grapes, berries, even the nonsensical “fapes,” which hints that even the natural is being corrupted. Wine is an organic system, rooted in nature, terroir, and tradition. It is variable, complex, and “fruitful.”

The “stronger stuff” — spirits like whiskey or vodka — is based on grain. It is a product of agriculture, industry, and technology (the still). It is more potent, more pure in its alcoholic strength, more uniform, and ultimately sterile — it “will bear no fruit.”

This is Zumwalt’s framing of the modern world. We have abandoned the complex, nuanced, sometimes weaker but fruitful “wine-based” systems (tradition, organic community, art) in favor of the more powerful, efficient, and structured, but ultimately sterile, “grain-based” systems (ideology, mass production, raw data). We have traded the vineyard for the factory.

III. The Inevitable and Absurd Collapse

The final section of the poem shows the consequence of this choice. Having built our world on these “stronger,” grain-based systems, we have created edifices of immense size and terrifying fragility.

A foundation falters when The edifice Is too Tall

The very structure of the poem on the page mimics a tall, teetering building, a brilliant piece of formal irony. These oversized systems are inherently unstable. Our attempts to secure them are flimsy:

And that is why there are building codes And yet laws may be broken

The “building codes” are our laws, our regulations, our ethical frameworks — society’s desperate attempt to keep our own creations from collapsing. But Zumwalt adds the cynical, inevitable truth: “And yet laws may be broken.” Our safeguards are fallible.

This leads to the final, unforgettable image of what this collapse will look like:

And in such disasters
Man’s fate will tumble like a
hippopotamus on
ice.

This is Zumwalt at his most devastatingly brilliant. The collapse of our grand, sophisticated civilization is not a noble, epic tragedy. It is not a graceful fall. It is the fall of a hippopotamus on ice. Hippos are creatures of immense size and power, and maybe from a absurdist viewpoint, extra-large relatives of barnyard pigs. So put ice skates on one of them, which would be a feat in itself, and we have this clumsy, completely out of its natural element, ungulate, trying to maintain balance but ultimately, and inevitably, headed, or maybe “rear-ended” — that’s a bad pun, I take it back — headed, and looking utterly, ridiculously pathetic, perhaps — headed for a fall. The image is both terrifying and darkly hilarious.

“Overflow” is Zumwalt’s warning about the hubris of scale. It argues that by pursuing over-amplified production over moderate levels of production, artifice over art, and size over stability, we have created a world that is precarious for the individual and destined for a collapse that will be stripped of all dignity. Our fate, he suggests, is not to burn out in a blaze of glory, but to slip, flail, and crash with the absurd, pathetic comedy of a hippo on a frozen pond.

Category:

Free Verse, Zumwalt Lecture

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poet

poet

she stabs her way into recognition
one victim at a time
receiving little pleasure in the crime

— zumwalt 1998

Category:

1998, Free Verse, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Zumwalt

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THIS JUST IN

This just in:

President Trump is renaming

The Department of Defense to
The Department of War

The Department of the Treasury to
The Department of the Shamelessly Wealthy

The Department of the Interior to
The Department of Exploitation

The Department of Commerce to
The Department of Tariffs

The Department of Labor to
The Department of the Indentured

The Department of Agriculture to
The Department of Agrobusiness

The Department of Housing and Urban Development to
The Department of Real Estate Developers

The Department of Transportation to
The Department of Congestion and Fumes

The Department of Energy to
The Department of Oil and No Windmills

The Department of Education
The Department of Denial of History

The Department of Veterans Affairs to
The Department of Veteran Neglect

The Department of Homeland Security to
The Department of Homeland Surveillance

The Department of Health and Human Services to
The Department of Disease and Ignorant Ramblings

The Department of Justice to

The Department of Justice to
The Department of Corruption, Blackmail and Revenge

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Uncategorized

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